Everything Shaw

The Shaw Project’s “The King, the Constitution and the Lady”

EVERYTHING SHAW

As one of our more successful dramatists, critics, and vegetarians, George Bernard Shaw inhabited the role of playwright-as-celebrity with the entitlement of one who had worked hard to put his early difficulties and poverty behind him. In newsreel after newsreel, the aged albeit sprightly Shaw, with his habitual beard and plus fours, became a familiar personality to American audiences. But his position as Irish sage often obscured the enormous volume of his work (more than fifty plays and sketches), which tended toward moralizing at the expense of dramaturgical sensitivity. Nevertheless, the gallant Project Shaw-—now in its second year-—is devoted to staging readings of every play he ever wrote. This month, the Project presents “The King, the Constitution and the Lady,” a heretofore unstaged work based on the Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson controversy, featuring the indomitable Marian Seldes. If one cannot learn from Shaw, one can always learn something from Seldes: how to make caricatures based on the news of the day real.

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994. He is the author of “White Girls.”